A Journey

My Political Life

In 1997, the biggest Labour victory in history swept England, ending eighteen years of Conservative government. Prime Minister Tony Blair -- young, charismatic and complex -- shaped the nation profoundly in the ten years that followed. From his work in Northern Ireland to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, few of his decisions were free from scrutiny and debate. Alternately beloved and reviled, he was an international figure to a degree matched by few British leaders -- a role he continues in to this day through the Tony Blair Faith Foundation and his work in the Middle East. Now, for the first time, we see the fascinating journey and difficult choices of the prime minister through his own eyes. Grippingly candid and deeply intimate, A Journey is a must-read political memoir, full of startling insights into a host of world leaders, including George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. It is also a book that delves deeply and profoundly into what it means to be in a position of great power today, and its emotional and personal toll.

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I am sure that the author had much to tell about his time in office that would have been fascinating. However, his writing is difficult to read through and full of unnecessary details. I gave up after the first chapter and just read the portion about the death of Princess Diana.

Chosen as Simon Winchester as his book of the year: "I read Tony Blair’s memoir A Journey: My Political Life in Australia, far from the madding crowd of anger and hysteria that first enveloped it back home in Britain (though I did indeed discover it mischievously re-catalogued under Crime Fiction in a bookstore in Brisbane, as some London wits had suggested it deserved).

"I didn't enjoy it; I wasn't challenged by it; nor was I moved by it, at least, not in the usual sense. But the commissioning note from the Globe also asked if any book from 2010 had provoked – and this one had, and in spades.

"It provoked in me inestimable feelings of a deep disappointment, derived from the astonishment that Britain's political system, and her sheep-like, TV-obsessed voting public, had ever handed the reins of a government that had once been in the hands of such as Gladstone, Disraeli, Salisbury, Lloyd George and Macmillan (not to mention the greatest of them all) to so mediocre, vain, mendacious, tawdry and intellectually shabby a figure as this memoir's author. I want Tony Blair forgotten, and swiftly; my fond hope is that this book's sheer awfulness – maybe provocative in 2010, but surely not for long thereafter – will perhaps help begin the necessary blotting-out."